В УПЦ (МП) кажуть, що їхнім представникам кричали: «Геть московського попа!»
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популярні новини
William Shatner, Monica Lewinsky and other prolific Twitter commentators — some household names, others little-known journalists — could soon be losing the blue check marks that helped verify their identity on the social media platform.
They could get the marks back by paying up to $11 a month. But some longtime users, including 92-year-old Star Trek legend Shatner, have balked at buying the premium service championed by Twitter’s billionaire owner and chief executive Elon Musk.
After months of delay, Musk is gleefully promising that Saturday is the deadline for celebrities, journalists and others who’d been verified for free to pony up or lose their legacy status.
“It will be glorious,” he tweeted Monday, in response to a Twitter user who noted that Saturday is also April Fools’ Day.
After buying Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk has been trying to boost the struggling platform’s revenue by pushing more people to pay for a premium subscription. But his move also reflects his assertion that the blue verification marks have become an undeserved or “corrupt” status symbol for elite personalities and news reporters.
Along with verifying celebrities, one of Twitter’s main reasons to mark profiles with a free blue check mark starting about 14 years ago was to verify politicians, activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as little-known journalists at small publications around the globe, as an extra tool to curb misinformation coming from accounts that are impersonating people.
Lewinsky tweeted a screenshot Sunday of all the people impersonating her, including at least one who appears to have paid for a blue check mark. She asked, “what universe is this fair to people who can suffer consequences for being impersonated? a lie travels half way around the world before truth even gets out the door.”
Shatner, known for his irreverent humor, also tagged Musk with a complaint about the promised changes.
“I’ve been here for 15 years giving my (clock emoji) & witty thoughts all for bupkis,” he wrote. “Now you’re telling me that I have to pay for something you gave me for free?”
Musk responded that there shouldn’t be a different standard for celebrities. “It’s more about treating everyone equally,” Musk tweeted.
For now, those who still have the blue check but apparently haven’t paid the premium fee — a group that includes Beyoncé, Stephen King, Barack and Michelle Obama, Taylor Swift, Tucker Carlson, Drake and Musk himself — have messages appended to their profile saying it is a “legacy verified account. It may or may not be notable.”
But while “the attention is reasonably on celebrities because of our culture,” the bigger concern for open government advocate Alex Howard, director of the Digital Democracy Project, is that impersonators could more easily spread rumors and conspiracies that could move markets or harm democracies around the world.
“The reason verification exists on this platform was not simply to designate people as notable or authorities, but to prevent impersonation,” Howard said.
One of Musk’s first product moves after taking over Twitter was to launch a service granting blue checks to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. But it was quickly inundated by imposter accounts, including those impersonating Nintendo, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Musk’s businesses Tesla and SpaceX, so Twitter had to temporarily suspend the service days after its launch.
The relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for iPhone and iPad users. Subscribers are supposed to see fewer ads, be able to post longer videos and have their tweets featured more prominently.
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Влада Китаю «безуспішно» намагалася повернути на батьківщину мільярдера, засновника компаній Alibaba Group та Ant Group Джека Ма, пише Bloomberg із посиланням на обізнані джерела.
Попри запевнення китайської влади про «непохитну підтримку» приватного сектору, Джек Ма вирішив залишитися за кордоном, кажуть співрозмовники видання. Ма заявив, що відійшов від управління своїми компаніями і хоче зосередитись на дослідженнях сільськогосподарських технологій.
Керівникам Alibaba і Ant Group Джем Ма повідомив, що їм не варто очікувати його повернення до Китаю, оскільки він «відданий їхньому успіху навіть на відстані».
У міру того, як глава КНР Сі Цзіньпін консолідує владу та переорієнтує увагу на економіку, нова команда хоче створити імідж, сприятливий для бізнесу. І Джек Ма, можливо, є одним із найкращих шансів Пекіна відновити свою репутацію у приватному секторі в Китаї та за його межами, зазначає видання.
South China Morning Post пише, що 27 березня цього року Джек Ма відвідав засновану ним школу в китайському місті Ханчжоу. За їхніми словами, Джек Ма зустрівся з вчителями та учнями школи, вони обговорили питання освіти та використання технологій штучного інтелекту. «Ми маємо використовувати штучний інтелект для вирішення проблем, а не для того, щоб він керував нами», – наводить його слова видання. Після цієї новини, за даними Bloomberg, акції Alibaba Group спочатку зросли на 5,5%, але згодом втратили всі свої позиції на Гонконгській біржі.
Джек Ма понад рік живе за кордоном. The Financial Times писало, що він поїхав до Токіо. Це сталося після того, як влада Китаю відклала на невизначений термін первинне розміщення акцій Ant Group на Шанхайській та Гонконзькій фондових біржах, а самого Ма регулятори викликали на допит. Джек Ма неодноразово критикував китайських урядовців. Він заявляв, що регуляторні заходи не відповідають часу, наполягав на захисті інтересів банків.
У квітні 2021 року Державне управління ринкового регулювання Китаю оштрафувало Alibaba Group за порушення антимонопольного законодавства на 18,2 млрд юанів (2,8 млрд. доларів) – це рекордний для Китаю корпоративний штраф. Регулятор звинуватив компанію, відому на європейському ринку інтернет-магазину AliExpress, у примусі продавців торгувати тільки на одній платформі.
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Some parts of Twitter’s source code — the fundamental computer code on which the social network runs — were leaked online, the social media company said in a legal filing on Sunday that was first reported by The New York Times.
According to the legal document, filed with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, Twitter had asked GitHub, an internet hosting service for software development, to take down the code where it was posted. The platform complied and said the content had been disabled, according to the filing. Twitter also asked the court to identify the alleged infringer or infringers who posted Twitter’s source code on systems operated by GitHub without Twitter’s authorization.
Twitter, based in San Francisco, noted in the filing that the postings infringe copyrights held by Twitter.
The leak creates more challenges for billionaire Elon Musk, who bought Twitter last October for $44 billion and took the company private. Since then, it has been engulfed in chaos, with massive layoffs and advertisers fleeing.
Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission is probing Musk’s mass layoffs at Twitter and trying to obtain his internal communications as part of ongoing oversight into the social media company’s privacy and cybersecurity practices, according to documents described in a congressional report.
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U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy said on Sunday lawmakers will move forward with legislation to address national security worries about TikTok, alleging China’s government had access to the short video app’s user data.
In the United States, there are growing calls to ban TikTok, owned by China-based company ByteDance, or to pass bipartisan legislation to give President Joe Biden’s administration legal authority to seek a ban. Devices owned by the U.S. government were recently banned from having the app installed.
“The House will be moving forward with legislation to protect Americans from the technological tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party,” McCarthy said on Twitter.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew appeared before a U.S. House Committee for about five hour on Thursday and lawmakers from both parties grilled him about national security and other concerns involving the app, which has 150 million American users.
In Thursday’s hearing, the TikTok CEO was asked if of the app, has spied on Americans at Beijing’s request. Chew answered, “No.”
Republican Representative Neal Dunn then referenced the company’s disclosure in December that some China-based employees at ByteDance improperly accessed TikTok user data of two journalists and were no longer employed by the company. He repeated his question about whether ByteDance was spying.
“I don’t think that spying is the right way to describe it,” Chew said. He went on to describe the reports as involving an “internal investigation” before being cut off.
McCarthy, a Republican, said in a tweet on Sunday, “It’s very concerning that the CEO of TikTok can’t be honest and admit what we already know to be true — China has access to TikTok user data.”
The company says it has spent more than $1.5 billion on data security efforts under the name “Project Texas” which currently has nearly 1,500 full-time employees and is contracted with Oracle Corp ORCL.N to store TikTok’s U.S. user data.
Rather than appease lawmakers’ concerns, Chew’s appearance before Congress on Thursday “actually increased the likelihood that Congress will take some action,” Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told ABC News on Sunday.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump lost a series of court rulings in 2020 when he sought to ban TikTok and another Chinese-owned app, WeChat, a unit of Tencent 0700.HK.
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